Background and Relevant Art
Computer systems and related technology affect many aspects of society. Indeed, the computer system's ability to process information has transformed the way we live and work. Computer systems now commonly perform a host of tasks (e.g., word processing, scheduling, accounting, etc.) that prior to the advent of the computer system were performed manually. More recently, computer systems have been coupled to one another and to other electronic devices to form both wired and wireless computer networks over which the computer systems and other electronic devices can transfer electronic data. Accordingly, the performance of many computing tasks are distributed across a number of different computer systems and/or a number of different computing environments.
Long-running applications, such as, for example, workflow applications, often benefit from periodically persisting their work to allow for the application to recover after errors, crashes, or machine failures. Persisting work permits applications to temporarily go idle and have their resources reassigned. To persist work, an application host coordinates the persisted state with runtime state to ensure that a consistent checkpoint is created. For example, the persisted state may need to coordinate with application transactions, message notifications, locks, local state caches, etc.
Many approaches to persisting work include a tightly coupled application host and state persistence system. That is, an application host is specifically designed to operate with the state persistence system and vice versa. Thus, to achieve new functionality using these approaches, both the application host and state persistence system must be updated simultaneously.
Additionally, the tight coupling used in many approaches limits the interoperability of application hosts and state persistence systems. That is, unless an application host and state persistence system are specifically designed for one another, there is little, if any, potential for interoperation. Further, application host extensions and persistence administration tools often add coordination requirements that cannot be predicted at the time that the application is originally developed. This adds further difficulties to facilitating interoperation between divergent application hosts and state persistence systems.
Accordingly, at least due to the inability of different application hosts and state persistence systems to interoperate, entities are often forced to utilize a number of different tightly coupled persistence approaches in parallel. Utilizing different approaches in parallel consumes increased computing resources and leads to increased administrative overhead. The difficulties are further exacerbated as the number of tightly coupled approaches increases.